Unplanned outages due to equipment failures can be disruptive and costly. Despite the availability of equipment performance data and rules implemented by existing monitoring and diagnostic (M&D) services, many of the outages are not detected before they occur. A primary reason for the failure to detect the outages is inefficient data analysis techniques. Such techniques or rules, for example, may fail to reduce the number of false alarms of equipment failures, thereby reducing the reliability and usability of existing prediction methods.